Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Humility in Numeracy

Numeracy, defined as a basic understanding and ability to work with numbers, matters. The less numerate earn less and have less wealth. They’re also more likely to have chronic disease, take more prescription drugs and be less able to follow the (partly numerated) instructions, thus adding more health risk. Some of this is conflated with […]

Learn More June 14, 2021

Update on the Cost of Embalming An Elephant

I know that’s a strange headline, but I wanted to call your attention to something so basic that I’m constantly amazed so many fundraisers simply overlook it. I’m talking about the basic data of our trade – names, addresses, deceased donors and fundamental demographics—the very “simple” stuff that makes the difference in any donor communication […]

Learn More June 11, 2021

The Corvallis Effect and Donor Fatigue

A mysterious student has been attending class at Oregon State University for the past two months enveloped in a big, black bag. Only his bare feet show. Each Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 11am the Black Bag sits on a small table near the back of the classroom. The class is Speech 113 – basic […]

Learn More June 9, 2021

Turning Vision Into Reality — Update on CopyOptimizer

Because it’s been a year since Kevin first unveiled CopyOptimizer™ this is an appropriate time for an update. His dream was creation of an online tool to help everyone–including you and me– write better, more effective copy. Anyhow, that vision has now turned into a reality. Lots of fundraisers are currently alpha testing it. I’ve come to recognize its immense value—especially where email is concerned. By and large the quality of copy where email is concerned is downright dreadful. Not healthy, especially when more and more organizations are relying […]

Learn More June 7, 2021

A “Winning”Test

Would you consider sending the same ask to the same person in the same time period but through two different channels? This technique is sometimes employed with emails that match the direct mail message and are timed to coincide with arrival in the physical mailbox. We tested the same notion but with a request for […]

Learn More June 4, 2021

Personality and The Words You Use

The University of Cambridge has a demo app predicting your personality on the Big Five based on word usage vis-a-vis your social media accounts. It’s quite accurate on seemingly very little data – I only linked to my infrequently used and only in a professional capacity, Twitter account. You’d think that’d be a biased sample […]

Learn More June 2, 2021